Читать книгу American Democracy in Context - Joseph A. Pika - Страница 119

In the 1930s, a period of prolonged drought led to severe dust storms that devastated farms, particularly in the state of Oklahoma and the surrounding Great Plains region. This so-called Dust Bowl struck at the worst possible time—in the midst of the Great Depression. It destroyed millions of acres of farmland and forced tens of thousands of families to abandon their farms and relocate. In all, it is estimated that as many as two million people were left homeless by the Dust Bowl.^a

^a The Dust Bowl, directed by Ken Burns (2012, Washington, DC: Florentine Films), http://www.pbs.org/kenburns/dustbowl/about/overview/

Suppose you were one of these impoverished farmers who lost everything and went looking for a better life elsewhere. No matter what state you came from, you would have been derisively dubbed an “Okie” (because so many of the migrants came from Oklahoma). Let’s assume you chose to go to California (a particularly popular destination in those days). Would you worry about California letting you in? Probably not, since today, we take it for granted that states cannot prohibit the entry of citizens from other states. But worry you should. Overwhelmed by the tremendous influx of impoverished people from other states, California reacted by trying to keep out their fellow Americans. There, you and your fellow Okies would have been marginalized as “‘criminals,’ ‘troublemakers,’ ‘parasites,’ ‘enemies of society,’ or, even worse, ‘radicals’”—even if you had been a prosperous pillar of your community before the Dust Bowl destroyed your farm.^b

^b Thomas Conner, “The Anti-Okie Panic,” This Land, November 10, 2016, http://thislandpress.com/2016/11/10/the-anti-okie-panic/

Had you arrived at the California border in 1936, you would likely have been rudely turned away by armed officers of the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD). The LAPD Police Chief, James Edgar (“Two-Gun”) Davis, deployed 136 of his officers to 16 major points of entry into California to block the migrant caravan. Had you somehow gotten into the state, Davis—who once said that constitutional rights only benefited “crooks and criminals”—would have threatened you with arrest and a 180-day jail term with hard labor.^c No one in California seems to have suggested building a wall at that time, but some might have welcomed it. In the spring of 1936, the San Francisco News commissioned John Steinbeck to write a series of articles about the plight of these migrants. Published in October 1936 as “The Harvest Gypsies,” they led to Steinbeck’s classic 1939 novel The Grapes of Wrath.

^c Cecilia Rasmussen, “LAPD Blocked Dust Bowl Migrants at State Borders,” Los Angeles Times, March 9, 2003, http://articles.latimes.com/2003/mar/09/local/me-then9

Then, in 1937, California passed legislation that criminalized bringing or helping to bring indigent people into the state. Thus, if you had friends or family in California who brought you into the state, they could have been punished, too. That is precisely what happened to a California resident named Edwards. He drove to Texas in 1940 and brought back to California his wife’s brother, who was unemployed. For this act of charity, Edwards was tried, convicted, and given a six-month suspended jail sentence.

Is that constitutional? Existing Supreme Court precedent at the time suggested that the California law used to convict Edwards could, indeed, be a valid exercise of California’s police power. In an 1837 case, Mayor of the City of New York v. Miln, the Court concluded that it is “as necessary for a State to provide precautionary measures against the moral pestilence of paupers, vagabonds, and possibly convicts as it is to guard against the physical pestilence, which may arise from unsound and infectious articles imported.”^d

^d Mayor of the City of New York v. Miln, 36 U.S. 102 (1837) at 142.

Edwards, however, appealed his conviction all the way to the Supreme Court. There, despite the earlier ruling in Miln, he won—thanks, in no small part, to the Court’s 1937 “switch in time” that led to its more expansive cooperative federalist reading of the commerce clause. In a unanimous decision in Edwards v. California (1941), the Supreme Court concluded that the law imposed an unconstitutional burden upon interstate commerce. In so doing, the Court also explicitly rejected the language of Miln: “Whatever may have been the notion then prevailing, we do not think that it will now be seriously contended that, because a person is without employment and without funds, he constitutes a ‘moral pestilence.’ Poverty and immorality are not synonymous.”^e

^e Edwards v. California, 314 U.S. 160 (1941) at 177.